Esmé Weijun Wang is a novelist who has been diagnosed with
Schizoaffective Disorder. The Collected Schizophrenias is a book
of personal essays that was the 2016 winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction
Prize.

A precocious young person on a track to success, Wang experiences
a manic episode at Yale that leads to her first hospitalization. After a second hospitalization, her college
washes its hands of her. Hitting
roadblocks time and time again requires her to rebuild her life over and over. This is not a conventional chronological
autobiography but rather essays that provide different approaches to the
author’s experience of mental illness.
The plural “schizophrenias” of the title encompasses the whole schizophrenic
spectrum of disorders. As Wang explains,
her own diagnosis is “the fucked-up offspring of manic depression and
schizophrenia” (p. 10).

In an essay entitled “High-Functioning” we learn how the
author, having been a fashion editor, knows how to pass for normal: “My makeup
routine is minimal and consistent. I can
dress and daub when psychotic and when not psychotic. I do it with zeal when manic. If I’m depressed, I skip everything but the
lipstick. If I skip the lipstick, that
means I haven’t even made it to the bathroom mirror” (p.44).

Later, in “The Choice of Children,” volunteering at a camp
for bipolar children makes Wang think about what it would be like to inflict
her diagnosis on her own offspring. In
“Reality, On-Screen” she attempts to convey the sensation of decompensating to psychosis. And in “Yale Will Not Save You” she considers
the failure of universities to accommodate mentally ill students.

Hope Sze is a resident in family medicine aiming to qualify for the extra year in emergency medicine training. She has just moved from her medical school in London, Ontario, to begin residency in St. Joseph’s Hospital, Montreal. Her furniture and clothing have not yet arrived.

On orientation day, she meets her resident colleagues and takes a shine to Alex who clearly likes her too. But the excitement and anticipation of this new chapter in their lives is disrupted when the body of one of the attending physicians is found lying in the locker room. A “whodunnit” with medicine, romance, and suspense in which Hope makes a few mistakes but manages to identify the murderer and the motives.

This Side of Doctoring is
an anthology published in 2002 about the experiences of women in medicine. While
the essays span multiple centuries, most are from the past 50 years. They reflect
on a multitude of stages in the authors’ personal and professional lives. In
344 pages divided into twelve sections, including "Early Pioneers,"
"Life in the Trenches," and "Mothering and Doctoring," the
146 authors recount - in excerpts from published memoirs, previously published
and unpublished essays, poems and other writings, many of them composed solely
for this collection - what it was then and what it was in 2002 to be a woman
becoming a doctor in the U.S.. All but a handful of the authors are physicians
or surgeons. There is a heavy representation from institutions on both coasts, especially
the Northeast. Four men were invited to reflect on being married to physician
wives. There is one anonymous essay concerning sexual harassment and a final essay
from a mother and daughter, both physicians.Beginning with the first American female physicians in the
mid-19th century, like historic ground-breakers Elizabeth Blackwell and Mary
Putnam Jacobi, the anthology proceeds through the phases of medical school,
residency, early and mid-careers, up to reflections from older physicians on a
life spent in medicine. Many of the authors have names well known in the
medical humanities, including Marcia Angell, Leon Eisenberg, Perri Klass,
Danielle Ofri, Audrey Shafer, and Marjorie Spurrier Sirridge, to mention a
few.

The essays and poems and letters have, as a partial listing, the following
subjects: family influences in becoming a physician; professional friendships; marriage;
children and their impact on a woman’s career in medicine; the decision not to
have children; ill family members; illness as a physician; establishing one's
sexuality as a physician; struggles with male physicians and their egos;
mentors, both female and male; memorable patients (often terminal or dying);
the life of a wife-physician, or mother-physician; the guilt and sacrifice that
accompany such a dual life; the importance - and easy loss - of personal time
or what internist Catherine Chang calls “self-care” (page 334).
The anthology also touches on how women have changed the
practice of medicine in various ways, prompted by the growing realization, as
family practice physician Alison Moll puts it, "that I didn't have to
practice in the traditional way" (page 185) The authors write about the wisdom of setting
limits; training or working part-time or sharing a position with another woman;
and the constant face-off with decisions, especially those not normally
confronting an American man becoming a doctor.
One conclusion is evident before the reader is halfway through the book: there
are many approaches to becoming a fulfilled female physician including finding
one’s identity in the field. Implicit in
most of the essays and writings is the lament from obstetrician-gynecologist
Gayle Shore Mayer: "Where is the self ? There are pieces
of me everywhere", (page 275) recalling a similar cry from Virginia
Woolf's Orlando, another essentially female soul trying to find what Richard
Selzer has called "The Exact Location of the Soul". Several authors discover that female physicians have
unique gifts to offer their patients. As internist Rebekah Wang-Cheng writes, “I
am a better physician because I am a mother, and I know because of my
experiences as a physician that I am a better mother.” (page 151)

There are sections at the end devoted to a glossary for the lay reader,
resources for women (as of 2002), and generous notes about the contributors
(which section also serves as a useful index of each's contributions).

This ambitious novel presents unusual events ten years after
an international adoption. Because of
the Chinese one-child policy, Chinese peasant woman Xiao Lu abandons her second
daughter Chun in a rural market, knowing that the child will be sent to an
orphanage. An American couple adopt the child, calling her Katie. As a
celebration for Katie’s tenth birthday, they return to southwest China, hoping
to meet the birth mother.

In a series of unusual events, they find Xiao Lu, and it is,
at first, a joyous event. Troubles mount, however, as the birth mother wants
Katie to stay with her, and Katie feels a mystical bond between them. Xiao Lu,
having left her husband, now lives as a hermit in a hut on the slopes of The
One Hundred Mile Mountain. She sweeps the 100 steps of The Elephant Temple
daily and practices calligraphy in her hut.

Pep and Clio Macy, having married late, could not get
pregnant. The novel satirizes them as aging Yuppies,
spoiled and materialistic.
Clio wears a Movado watch worth hundreds if not thousands of dollars. The
family’s cockerpoo has been boarded at home. Katie dislikes being the only Chinese
American in her private school.
After the birth mother has been found, the mood of the book changes.
Xiao Lu wants her child returned, and the Macys fear that they are in danger.
In the last 100 pages, nature itself attacks the Americans with snakes, monkeys,
bats, a huge millipede, and even the weather. Pep is injured and receives rough,
traditional medical treatment from a monk; it appears to be effective, however,
in healing his heart physically and spiritually—a resonance with the book’s
title. Katie becomes more and more like Xiao, learning calligraphy and some
Chinese language. When Xiao is grievously injured by the monkeys, the Macys effectively
care for her, and previous conflicts are resolved.

Performance poet Bao Phi was born in Saigon; his parents emigrated to Minnesota, where he grew up and still lives. His poetry is rooted in Asian American immigrant experience, especially in Vietnamese American experiences, and speaks of racism, economic hardship, cultural difference, and the legacy of the Vietnam war. The collection is divided into four sections, each preceded by a quote from another (usually Asian American) writer. Four introductory poems set the tone for the poet's project of "refugeography" (from "You Bring Out the Vietnamese in Me", p. 9): recognition and celebration of the variety of Asian American lives, and anger at exploitation - both economic and cultural: "They box our geography / And sell it in bougie boutiques / Our culture quite profitable / But can somebody tell me / How our culture can be hip / And yet our people remain invisible?" ("For Us", p. 1)

In section 2 (The Nguyens) 14 poems highlight the lives of a variety of unrelated individuals and families across the US who have the same family name. "They are one story for every Viet body, one song for every voice that sings or otherwise" (p. 17). Many are angry and bitter. There is the Sacramento girl who grows up, makes good, and wants now to get even with the white boy who pushed her down and called her "gook" in ninth grade: "where is your wheat- haired crown now, / where is your Made- in- America tongue: / a slide of spit to take me back to where I came from / now that I am ready to show you / show you / where I come from" ("Vu Nguyen's Revenge", p. 20). There is the chef who had once worked in the kitchen of a restaurant where the waitstaff was white only: "let me tell you that the white people / can choke to death on their lychee martinis" ("Fusion", p. 24). Others are reflective - such as the soldier in Iraq who meditates, "let me not tear apart a people, a country, causing Iraqi food to / become the nouvelle cuisine in 25 years back home" ("Mercy", p. 29).

Some wrestle with generational misunderstanding: Dotty from Dallas whose mother "hid the food stamps by holding [her] hand out like a fan of shame at the checkout line" and later kicked her out of the family, accusing her of being a "Commie" (p. 45). There is tongue in cheek irony, such as in "The Nguyen Twins Find Adoration in the Poetry World" (p. 40), about two vastly different poets - Joan, who has an Anglo boyfriend, publishes in respected traditional literary journals, includes in her work Vietnamese sentences "she never fails to translate" and who won the "safe ethnic poet award"; and Jesus, whose poems are "system fascist overthrow racism working class" performed on Def Poetry Jam where he mispronounces all three of the only Vietnamese words he uses in his poetry.

Numerous poems in sections 3 and 4 address racism. "Reverse Racism" (p. 59) imagines the tables being turned on whites: schools that teach only Asian-American history and suspend any student who questions it; jobs that "stick white men in middle -management hell, then put them on a pedestal as an example of how whites can be successful", and "when white men form their own groups to protect themselves, I'll accuse them of being separatists and reverse racists". "Dear Senator McCain" (p. 65) begins with a quote from the year 2000 in which the senator (who had been imprisoned and tortured by the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam war) says, "I hate the gooks. I will hate them as long as I live." The poem issues a challenge: "I am that gook waiting in your nightmare jungle / that gook in front of you with 17 items in the 10 items or less lane at the supermarket / that gook born with a grenade in his head / that gook that got a better grade than you in shop class" and ends, "Senator / what's the difference / between an Asian /and a gook / to you".

Another poem ("8 [9]", p. 93) is based on the 2006 killing of a 19-year-old Hmong American by a white policeman in Minneapolis. There is despair ("For Colored Boys in Danger of Sudden Unexplained Nocturnal Death Syndrome and All the Rest for Whom Considering Suicide Is Not Enuf ", p. 82 ). There are also poems of self-awareness, for example, of the dichotomy of an earlier ghetto life and a later "fancy college" experience ("Called [An Open Letter to Myself]", p. 76); intra-ethnic suspicion and misunderstanding ("Everyday People", p. 99); energy and pride ("Yellowbrown Babies for the Revolution", p. 86).

Carol Levine's anthology of stories and poems about the intimate caregiving that takes place within families and among friends and lovers reminds us that the experience of illness reaches beyond clinicians and patients. It can also touch, enrich, and exasperate the lives of those who travel with patients into what Levine calls the land of limbo. This land oddly resembles the place where some Christian theologians believe lost souls wander indefinitely between heaven and hell. For Levine the limbo of familial caregiving is an unmapped territory. In it caregivers perform seemingly endless medical, social, and psychological labors without professional training and with feelings of isolation and uncertainty. Caregiving in this modern limbo, created by contemporary medicine's capacity to extend the lives of those with chronic conditions and terminal illnesses, has become, according to Levine, "a normative experience" (1).

By compiling this useful selection of well known and less familiar stories and poems, Levine increases the visibility of the experience of familial caregiving among works of literature about medicine. While illness literature is typically classified by disease or disability, Levine focuses instead on the relationships between caregivers and those being cared for. Her collection organizes the literature into five parts: Children of Aging Parents; Husbands and Wives; Parents and Sick Children; Relatives, Lovers, and Friends; and Paid Caregivers who assist families. The literature in each section tends nonetheless to represent particular conditions: dementias, including Alzheimer's disease, cancer, and frailty in the first two sections; childhood cancer, hyperactivity, and mental illness in the third; AIDS in the fourth.

These and the less familiar works offer disparate responses from both caregivers and those they care for. The narrator of Tereze Gluck's "Oceanic Hotel, Nice" thinks "what a bad person I was to not even want to touch his feet. . . it made me shudder" (220). The wife in Ann Harleman's "Thoreau's Laundry" cannot place her husband with Multiple Sclerosis in a nursing home because "his presence, however diminished, was as necessary to her as breathing" (116). The caregiver in "Starter" by Amy Hanridge "didn't want to be the person people feel bad about" (180). Several stories explore the limits of obligation. As is often the case, the son in Eugenia Collier's "The Caregiver" is sick himself, failing to schedule his own doctor's appointments and dying before his mother. Marjorie Kemper's witty, exuberant "God's Goodness" plays out an unexpected relationship between a dying teenage boy and his Chinese immigrant aide, while his parents remain in the background.

Carol Levine's brief introduction to the collection explains that she excluded excerpts from memoirs and selected only very recent literature, almost all from the past three decades. A Resources section at the end includes some introductory medical humanities resources and practical resources for caregivers.

Kitty Fane is a beautiful young woman whose mother has raised her to make a suitable match. But Kitty refuses a number of suitors; several years pass and eventually she is reduced to marrying Walter, the colonial bacteriologist in Hong Kong. Walter is a shy and awkward man who loves Kitty passionately, but has no idea how to express it; Kitty is charming and socially adept, but vacuous. In Hong Kong Kitty engages in a yearlong affair with Charles Townsend, the assistant colonial secretary, and a married man whose celebrity potential far eclipses Walter's stolid scientific work. The novel opens when Walter discovers his wife's infidelity.

Kitty believes that Townsend is madly in love with her and prepared to divorce his wife and sacrifice his career to marry her. Walter, who suffers from a broken heart, gives Kitty an ultimatum--either Townsend must promise to divorce his wife and marry her, or Kitty must accompany Walter to a city in the interior where he has volunteered to go to fight the cholera epidemic. Townsend demurs; Kitty is crushed; and the desperately unhappy pair travels to the cholera-ridden city, where they move into the house of the newly-dead missionary.

There, Walter (who is also a medical doctor) sets to work, day and night, to institute public health measures and care for dying patients. Meanwhile, Kitty meets Waddington, the British consul, a cynical alcoholic, who is at heart a good and honest person; and the French nuns, who labor tirelessly to care for orphans and the ill. Impressed by the nuns' selflessness, Kitty begins to devote herself to assisting them and trying to understand their spirituality.

When he learns that Kitty is pregnant, Walter asks if it is his child; Kitty responds, "I don't know." This completes the destruction of Walter's heart, and he soon dies of cholera--presumably as a result of experimenting on himself to find a cure. Kitty learns that the nuns, the soldiers, and all the people of the city consider Walter a saint, who has sacrificed himself for their welfare. However, while Kitty has learned to respect her husband, she could never love him.

Kitty stays only briefly in Hong Kong before returning home to London. Shortly before her arrival, she learns that her mother, whom she believes is responsible for her (Kitty's) shallowness, has died. The novel ends with Kitty vowing to bring up her daughter as a strong and independent woman, and preparing to move with her father to the Bahamas, where he has recently been appointed Chief Justice.

Black Bag Moon is a collection (one is tempted to say a "mixed black bag") of short stories (but not clearly "short fictions" - clarified below) about medical patients. The reputed authors are identified as these patients' physicians, who recount these stories in first person. By my math, there are nine authors who narrate stories about 37 patients in 29 chapters. Most chapters have two patients in unrelated stories that sometimes share a theme. Several of the authors know each other as colleagues and two are a married medical couple. Most of the stories occur in Australia or New Zealand but some are in places are as far flung as England, Scotland and unidentified, possibly fictional, islands in the South Pacific. The practitioners are, for the most part, family physicians and care for people of all ages, providing care for everything from breast masses to congestive heart failure to trauma to occupational health to - almost overwhelmingly - mental illness threatening severe violence. The last - serious mental illness - is, as are all the patients and their illnesses in this volume, almost exotically different from anything most readers of this database are likely to encounter as health care providers or readers. Think Crocodile Dundee or perhaps television's Dr. Quinn or ‘Doc' Adams of Gunsmoke. Or all the above but in the late 20th Century Outback.

Since most of the stories involve working men and women - mainly men - there is a decided flavor of A. J. (Archibald Joseph) Cronin's The Citadel to the stories; but the peculiar aspect of Australia's frontier pervades each encounter with the patients in this book, whether they are being treated over the radio for breast lumps, being airlifted to the hospital for a badly broken elbow, or becoming demented from environmental toxins in a land and time wherein OSHA and DEP (and the principles underlying them) might as well be acronyms from Mars.

Curiously, for fiction, there are intermittent footnotes to literary (Honore de Balzac, Soubiran) sources, historical figures (Hippocrates) and relevant texts on subjects covered in the stories, e.g., petrol-sniffing, tropical diseases, and physical diagnosis.

This collection of 16 short stories focuses on doctors and patients in San Francisco, where a wide variety of wealth and culture impact the delivery of medical care.Further, there are many restrictions—financial, bureaucratic, ethical, and legal —that limit what doctors can do, especially in cases of patients near death.

The author, Louise Aronson, is a geriatrician who knows this terrain very well, having trained in San Francisco and worked as a physician there. A skilled writer and close observer, she has created dramatic and often funny stories that reveal social and bioethical complexity. About half the stories describe end-of-life issues for the aged and the dilemmas for their physicians and families.

In ‘The Promise,” Dr. Westphall orders comfort care only for an elderly patient who has suffered a massive stroke, but a hospital gives full treatment because there was no advance directive and the daughter told the attending to do “what he thought best.”

When Dr. Westphall sees this barely functioning patient in a skilled nursing facility seven months later, he tenderly washes her face and hair—although the text teases us that he might have been prepared to kill her.

In “Giving Good Death,” a doctor is in jail charged with murder; he has fulfilled the request of Consuela, a Parkinson’s patient, to help her die. When it appears that she may have died for other reasons, he is released, his life “ruined.” He leaves San Francisco, and, we surmise, medicine. In three other stories, doctors also leave the profession: the cumulative stresses of work and family and/or a sense that it’s not the right path bring them to that choice.

On the other hand, one of the longer pieces “Becoming a Doctor” celebrates the profession, despite all the rigors of training including sexism against women.

The stories bring multicultural insights; we read of people from China, Cambodia, Latin America, India, Russia, and the Philippines. Some are African-American; some Jewish, some gay. These different backgrounds color notions of health, death, and medical care. There are also pervasive issues of poverty and, at another extreme, professionalism that is hyper-rational and heartless.

Indeed, a recurring theme is care and love for people, no matter their background or current health status. A surgeon realizes (regrettably too late) that the secret of medical care is “caring for the patient—for anyone—just a little. Enough, but not too much” (p. 135).

When Lia Lee's sister slammed the front door to their Merced, California, apartment, Lia experienced her first in several years of increasingly severe seizures. The Lee family knew that the noise had awakened a dab, an evil spirit who stole Lia's soul. They also knew, in the midst of their grief for their infant daughter, that people suffering from "the spirit catches you and you fall down" often grew up to be healers in their Hmong culture.

Not surprisingly, the physicians and other health professionals who worked with Lia and her parents over the next seven-plus years did not share this diagnosis--most of them did not even know about it. Fadiman melds her story of Lia, the Lees, the family's physicians and social workers, and countless other people who enter the Lees' life (usually uninvited and unwelcome) with the long history of the Hmong people, their religion and culture, and their more recent lives as refugees from war in Laos and Cambodia (and the troubled history of their relationship to the U.S. military system).